Booker Prize Winners (1989)

On a recent Booknotes, Peter Hitchens (brother of Christopher
and resident of the opposite end of the political spectrum) was discussing
his book The Abolition of Britain. Framed by the funerals
of Winston Churchill and Princess Di, the book argues that the greatness
of Britain has passed, subsumed in the familiar morass of statism, political
correctness, and egalitarianism. After listening to his lament, Brian
Lamb asked him what one thing about that now departed Britain he would
most like to bring back; Hitchens answer : "Mainly civility..." Now,
much of the conservative yearning for the past must be taken with a grain
of salt--no one, or very few, think the world was actually a better place
fifty years ago, with Jim Crow laws and the like--but on this one point
conservatives clearly have a case for the superiority of the past : nothing
good has come of the coarsening of society. The complete abandonment
of manners and etiquette has been an unmitigated disaster.

The argument against civility and manners is that they represent an
artificial facade; and we after all live in an age when you're supposed
to "act naturally," "be yourself," "let it all hang out," etc., ad nauseum.
In the first place, the serious and determined cultivation of civility
( a la George Washington) can serve to shape the underlying person : careful
tending to the facade can result in the edifice coming to resemble its
front. Second, even if public behavior based on strict etiquette
is a front, it is favorable to the alternative : better to be treated decently
by someone who loathes you than to be treated in a manner that coincides
with their true feelings. Which brings us to the final point, having
seen what we're all really like without our masks of civility on, does
anyone really want their fellow man to keep on letting it all hang out
? While everyone is busy "being themselves," we've come to
the sad realization that we don't much like those selves. Which is
not to say that we would liked those selves any better fifty years ago,
but, thankfully, fifty years ago those selves weren't on display, instead
everyone presented an admittedly artificial, but blessedly good mannered
self to the world.

Come we now to Kazuo Ishiguro's justly praised novel, The Remains
of the Day. In the character of Mr. Stevens, a nearly perfect
English butler, Ishiguro created one of the most memorable and sympathetic
figures in all of fiction. As Stevens drives his new American employer's
car across the countryside, on his way to visit a former housekeeper, Miss
Kenton, whom he hopes to lure back top work at Darlington Hall, he reflects
on his years of service to Lord Darlington and his own rather complicated
relationship with Miss Kenton. Through a series of flashbacks, we
learn that Lord Darlington was a leading light in the movement to appease
Hitler prior to WWII, and that, though neither ever managed to articulate
their feelings, Stevens and Miss Kenton were very likely in love with one
another, though she eventually left to marry another former staffer.
Eventually, as our modern sensibilities seem to require, Stevens comes
to understand that he has made a series of dubious, perhaps even tragic,
choices, and that both his service to Darlington and his failure to woo
Miss Kenton have resulted in his wasting his life.

That at least is the intended lesson we are to draw from the story.
But lurking within this rather flaccid moral is an ever greater tragedy,
one which makes Stevens one of the truly great heroes of Western literature,
until his rather maudlin closing scenes make him seem pathetic. The
more intriguing reading of the story is that Stevens--with his unyielding
professionalism, his ethic of service, and his personal reserve--represents
all that was best about the society that has passed. Like Don
Quijote, he stubbornly adheres to a code which the rest of the world
has forsaken, and like Quijote, his idealism, though easily caricatured,
is more appealing than the real world that he refuses to accede to.

Ishiguro stacks the deck against this interpretation in two particular
ways. First, he makes Darlington and the "appeasers" into pure tools
of the Nazis and casts them as a tiny band of wholly deluded aberrations.
In fact, appeasement, so-called, was extraordinarily popular at the time.
It was actually those few in favor of War, like Winston Churchill, who
were the social outcasts and were considered outside the mainstream of
political thought. It is instructive that William Manchester's very
good book on Churchill during these years is called, simply : Alone.
For all that Ishiguro treats Neville Chamberlain like a member of a clandestine
cabal, bent on foisting a secret appeasement on Britain, it is well to
remember that he was hailed as a hero when he returned from Munich having
secured "peace in our time." when a democratic leader achieves the
will of the overwhelming majority of the people, he may be said to have
acted unwisely, but he can hardly be said to have acted beyond the bounds
of reason.

Nor is it as self evident as some would like that the appeasers were
wrong, even in retrospect, if we consider only British national interests.
There is no likelihood that the Nazis ever could have conquered Britain,
nor that they could have long held it had they succeeded. The War,
though it ultimately ended with Nazi Germany defeated, devastated Britain.
The civilization for which Winston Churchill fought did not long survive
him, which inevitably raises the question of whether it was a worthwhile
fight.

Ishiguro counts on our willfully blind remembrance of the War, which
has been glorified into a popular and noble struggle against the Holocaust
and its perpetrators, to make Darlington seem more ridiculous than the
events of the day or subsequent history would indicate him to be.
The intent is of course to cast a pall over Stevens's service to the man,
by debasing the cause he served, but this is manifestly unfair. Moreover,
it raises an unfortunate analogy between fascism and the English pre-War
culture, such that Darlington's service to the Nazis is akin to Steven's
service to Darlington, as if the two are intertwined. This is ludicrous.

There were, of course, British fascists. And anti-Semitism was
prevalent and virulent, though not as virulent as in continental Europe.
But to portray Darlington as a genuine fascist or anti-Semite would make
him so abhorrent that Steven's loyalty to him would not be at all sympathetic.
But the demands of the novel should not have led Ishiguro to completely
rewrite history. We are ignorant enough of our own history without
the popular culture further clouding it.

As for Miss Kenton, here to Ishiguro tries to have it both ways.
She is only slightly less reserved than Stevens--after all, it's not as
if she ever comes right out and tells him how she feels either. But
at the same time, he has her flee, rather than work things out. And
they would work out eventually : even proper English butlers married and
had kids, witness Stevens's own father. Perhaps their reserve would
have made the process agonizingly slow, but we have no doubt it would eventually
have happened and, in the meantime, their relationship, though stilted,
had always seemed one of immense rewards and real affection, however frustrating
at times.

At novel's end, it's hard not to feel that it was Miss Kenton who made
the mistake by leaving, rather than Stevens by not stopping her.
A Stevens who was capable of the type of emotional openness for which Miss
Stevens seems to be pleading, and which Ishiguro apparently thinks healthy,
would not even be the same person with whom both she and we have fallen
in love. This is the odd paradox of the novel : Ishiguro has crafted
this character who readers love, but is suggesting that he should be someone
else entirely.

Though the author intends us to see tragedy in Stevens inability to
change, it is far easier to perceive tragedy in the way the surrounding
world did change. The world of Churchill and Darlington and Stevens
has been, as Peter Hitchens says, abolished. In its stead stands
the Britain of Tony Blair and Charles and Camilla and Elton John.
Gone are gentlemen's gentlemen. Gone are gentlemen. Gone is
the ideal of "dignity" of which Stevens so often speaks in the novel.
How can that conceivably be a good thing ?